It Gets Even Worse for Newspapers

It's been a hellish decade for members of the once-mighty newspaper industry, but down in Miami, the ink-stained wretches have just endured the deepest insult of all. It is now official policy that the Miami Herald's long and powerful history of dominance over the Miami media is not worth preserving.

Andres Viglucci and Elaine Walker of the Herald report:

Miami's historic preservation board on Monday narrowly decided against designation of The Miami Herald building as a protected landmark, in a daylong public hearing marked by acrimony and outbursts by consultants working for the property's owner, Malaysian casino operator Genting.

The board voted 5-3 to turn down a designation report by the city preservation's officer, who concluded that the building merited landmark status under four of the historic and architectural criteria required by city ordinance. Only one criterion need be met for a building to qualify for designation. (snip)

A majority of board members, however, said they were unpersuaded that the building's history, the role played by the newspaper's owners, editors and executives in city and newspaper history, and the structure's distinctive but popularly unloved mid-20th Century Miami Modern design, were factors weighty enough to save the building.

It is sometimes difficult for media-saturated 21^st century Americans to grasp how powerful were the dominant newspapers in cities all across America in most of the preceding century. Not so long ago, daily newspapers ruled mass media and generated vast fortunes.  A few of them have left architectural monuments of the first order, such as the New York Daily News's art deco skyscraper

by Raymond Hood, and the Chicago Tribune's faux Gothic tower featured flying buttresses.

Both newspapers remain alive for now, while the Chicago Daily News, which expired decades ago, still has its name on an impressive art deco skyscraper a few blocks down the Chicago River from the Tribune Tower.

Like the two Chicago newspapers, the Miami Herald took for itself a prominent waterfront location, but it waited a few decades later to build it. The resulting office building and printing plant complex is in a style that currently is unfashionable, although the point of architectural preservation might include taking a longer view than what is currently en vogue.

My home town of Minneapolis demolished what is now lamented as a lost architectural masterpiece, the Metropolitan Building, in the 1960s, in a paroxysm of urban renewal, in part because Richardson Romanesque was out of style, and the powers that be at the time preferred the sort of midcentury modern aesthetic that now languishes in Miami.

According to a friend who once worked for the Herald, it was not a particularly pleasant building in the interior, with no striking spaces at all comparable to the elegant and romantic lobby of the New York Daily News.

As a supporter of property rights, and realizing that a decision to "protect" the Herald building would cost its rightful owners many millions of dollars, I can't really object to the decision taken in Miami, even though I lamernt the loss of places like Penn Station, The Metropolitan Building, and other significant structures that once defined the places that hosted them. The likely replacement for the building, luxury condominiums, a luxury hotel, restaurants and retail shops, plus a baywalk, will generate more tax revenue and open space for the public.

The steady collapse of the newspaper industry has deeply humiliated many of the most powerful members of the liberal journalistic establishment.  Now the very good government forces the media have succored for so many years are turning their backs on a way memorialize their former glory in steel, stone, and glass, right on the Miami waterfront.

Pride goeth before the fall.

Hat tip: David Paulin